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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

RE/MEMBERING WOMEN, RE/MINDING MEN: THE GENDER POLITICS OF ANARCHIST
HISTORY.

Judy Greenway

Visiting Research Fellow

University of East London

March 2010

Following
the PSA conference, an expanded version of this paper will be made available on
my website www.judygreenway.org.uk. This is a work in
progress, so please contact me if you want to cite or quote from it.

In 1876, American anarchist feminist Angela Heywood, fierce
critic of what she subsequently termed ‘invasive he-ism’, wrote of the
possibilities for social transformation in a politics which took account of
women:

[L]earning
will confess its ignorance of us; books (simply because they are he
books) will move forward from their alcove shelves and come down ashamed … to
be books … [W]ars between men's and women's eyes and ideas will become unique
and renovating.[i]

In this spirit of hopeful critique I want to raise some
fundamental questions for anyone trying to write historically about anarchism
and/or to write history as an anarchist.

I will draw on examples from my historical research into anarchism
and gender in Britain, and my own experiences as an anarchist and feminist.
Although the history of anarchist gender politics is not the same as the gender
politics of anarchist history writing, I hope to show that the two are
intertwined.

At their best, anarchist histories can suggest new ways of
understanding anarchist theory and practice, challenge current orthodoxies,
provide stories to feed the imagination. But as the quote from Heywood implies,
anarchist histories can re-produce ignorance.And ignorance, as philosopher Marilyn Frye points out,

is
not a passive state [but] a complex result of many acts and many negligences …
[H]ear the active verb ‘to ignore’ in the word ignorance.[ii]

Rather than criticising specific authors or publications, though,
my intention in this paper is to generate a discussion about general
principles. I will outline some problems and questions and then focus on
imagining how new kinds of history might be produced.[iii]

*

Listen to some women talking about their experiences of
English anarchism.

·The men sit and philosophise, while the women get on with the
work.[iv]

I resent washing [dishes] while men sit
and smoke and settle the problems of the universe.[v]

In [the group] I felt like a spectator
… that slightly ‘off’ feeling, that you’re somehow not there, in the way
that men are there.[vi]

I walked into the room and there were
eight men there and I was the only woman …I said ‘Excuse me comrades, where are all the women?’ And they said
‘They’re in the Women’s Movement’. And business then proceeded as usual …
the change isn’t happening.[vii]

The anarchist movement is not gender
neutral. We are tired of being told that anarchists don’t need to be
feminists, because ‘anarchism has feminism covered’.[viii]

If we begin with immediate personal
things, greater and greater opportunities are likely to occur … I wish to
express [anarchism] in my life.[ix]

That
last speaker, from 1912, was accused of individualism. Those voices span a
hundred years, to 2009, and the recurrent themes are striking: the experience
of being in a minority; the sexual division of labour; feeling invisible;
women’s desire for change, and men’s reluctance to take women’s issues
seriously. These are not specific to anarchism, but have a special resonance
for a politics that is meant to stand against all forms of oppression and
hierarchy. And while instances of sexism and machismo need to be challenged,
deeper structural issues need to be taken on board if anarchism is to broaden
its appeal to women.

At last year’s Anarchist Movement Conference in London, a
group of anarchist feminists intervened to protest male domination of the
movement.[x]
Their anger and disillusion are not new. In early twentieth century England,
many anarchist women found that the insurgent feminism of that period offered
them something that they needed: they might not care about the vote, but they
did care about fighting for women’s freedom. For them, there was noeither/or between anarchism and
feminism: they needed both.[xi]During the 1970s, anarchist feminist
groups and publications flourished within the Women’s Liberation Movement. Some
of the women involved were new to anarchism; others abandoned the mixed
anarchist groups in which they had felt ignored, silenced, and sometimes
exploited. A few of us, optimism triumphing over experience, tried remaining
active in both kinds of group. Feminism gave us new ways of thinking about our
experiences, and the upsurge of women’s history inspired some of us to
investigate the history of women in anarchism, as one way of helping to
understand our own situation.[xii]

It
may be that anarchism in theory embraces women but, at least in England,
women do not in general embrace anarchism.In every mixed anarchist group or meeting I have been to over a period
of forty-five years, women have been in the minority, often a tiny minority.
The textual spaces of anarchist history writing replicate the physical spaces
of the anarchist movement. With some welcome exceptions, here too women are
regularly minoritised, segregated, silenced or ignored.[xiii]
While feminist historiography has flourished since the 1970s, in general
anarchist history has been slow to engage with these new developments.Even before you start reading, look at lists
of authors and conference speakers, look in indexes, look at chapter and
section headings, look at bibliographies:

Excuse
me, comrades, where are all the women?

The
next section of the paper sketches out some different approaches in feminist
historiography, noting their relevance for anarchist historians.

Feminist
Historiographies

The additive approach
is a regular starting point for addressing exclusions from history. Existing
histories are seen to be lacking an important element, which the new history
seeks to add: restoring women to their rightful place in history, as the cliché
goes. Initially, the focus tends to be on individuals, often in a search for —
if not heroines — women who were precursors of today’s feminist concerns.In anarchist history, this approach attempts
to add figures such as Emma Goldman or Voltairine de Cleyre to the canon of
important anarchists. (I will return later to the issue of ‘importance’.)The value of this approach is that besides
(re)discovering previously neglected figures, it draws attention to the process
of canon formation; at its best it can also demonstrate something about the
processes of ignoring and forgetting.

The Emma Goldman
Short-Circuit.

Within anarchist history writing, the major beneficiary of
the additive approach has been Emma Goldman.[xiv]
The one woman known outside anarchist circles, her work was extensively
republished in the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and she has
been the focus of numerous books and articles since then, some of them
excellent; analyzing these would take far more space than I have here.[xv]
But I want to highlight how invocation of the name ‘Emma Goldman’ is used to
forestall debates about anarchist feminism – what I call the Emma Goldman
short-circuit.

More than once, I have heard such comments as: ‘Of course,
Emma said it all before’. Such remarks are made not out of respect for Goldman,
but out of disrespect for what is being said now.It implies that post-Goldman there is nothing
else to be said (or listened to) about feminism. Indeed a recent book claims
that, before Emma Goldman, feminism was irrelevant to anarchists because it was
only about the vote. In fact, the multiple feminisms of Goldman’s own time and
place concerned themselves with a wide range of issues, and as already
mentioned, involved many anarchist women.

Goldman’s own relationships with feminists and feminism were
deeply ambivalent. Her critique of the women’s movement of the period fails to
acknowledge its diversity and complexity: in casting herself as the pioneer of
true emancipation, she renders other anarchist feminists invisible. To use her
to attack anarchism feminism now, compounds this invisibility. Anarchist
feminism neither began nor ended with Goldman. Although even pointing this out
helps to keep her name in the limelight, the spotlight here is on her role in
anarchist historiography (and anti-feminist argumentation).

The Women’s Issues
Approach

If, reductively described, the additive approach increases
the number of women’s names in a book’s index, the women’s issues approach
increases the number of topics. This approach investigates specific areas of
life which have been of particular concern to women, throwing light on
previously neglected areas of history such as domestic labour, reproduction,
and sexuality, revealing ‘hidden’ lives. Although it can be seen as a variation
of the additive approach, at its best it goes further in its challenge to
existing histories, to the ideas of what is or is not important, historically
significant or indeed capable of serious study and investigation. It also
facilitates an analysis that focuses on groups and movements rather than
individuals.

In anarchist history this approach is most evident in
writings about sexuality and reproductive freedom; whether or not characterized
as ‘women’s issues’ these are areas in which many anarchist women have been
actively involved, and so become more visible to researchers. Despite attempts
by some historians to characterize such activism as about free speech or as
somehow gender neutral, many such women did indeed develop a specifically
anarchist-feminist perspective.[xvi]

The danger with an issue-based approach is that it
facilitates ghettoizing: so for example the importance of sexuality may be
acknowledged in passing in a broad history of anarchism, but it still doesn’t
get integrated or given a major place: in-depth considerations are graciously
left to the women and queers (and a few fellow travellers).Too often, if mentioned at all, ‘women’s
issues’, get at best segregated quarters in a chapter or sub-section of a book
or paper, at worst a passing mention in a sentence listing all the things
anarchism supposedly includes.

The Inclusive
Approach is in some respects a more complex variation of the additive
approach. Typically, it takes particular historical events, campaigns, or
movements which may have been extensively studied before, and investigates the
roles played by women: it seeks to put women back into the picture. This
approach has made some major inroads into histories of trade unionism, peace
activism, and socialist movements. A noteworthy example from anarchist history
is found in studies of the role of women in the Spanish Civil War.[xvii]Histories which in previous tellings were
male-dominated, become more complex as women’s roles are acknowledged. Old
stories are refreshed and re-evaluated.Women are re-membered – they
become part of all histories. To those who argue that in anarchism in some
times and places there were no women or very few, I would say look again — you
may be surprised, as I have been in my own researches. Often it is women who
are providing the practical support, the enabling, that keeps more visible
activities going:

The men sit and philosophise, while the women get on with the
work.

Acknowledging political housework changes the picture and
raises again questions about what is seen and what is valued in anarchist
histories.

In challenging existing versions of history, the inclusive
approach can begin to draw attention to the processes of historical exclusion —
from outright misogyny to those blind spots which are inevitable in any,
necessarily partial, history. It is perhaps less successful than the women’s
issues approach at challenging the way those histories are structured — what
determines an era, or counts as a significant event? Why are some stories seen
as important, while others never get told?

The Transformative
Approach

It was in considering such questions that some feminist
historians began to rethink their approach, to ask what would happen if the
focus was on gender rather than on women. If, rather than being a natural or a
social category, ‘woman’ can only be understood as a relational term, then men
and masculinity need to be looked at in order to understand what is happening
to women. If women need to be re-membered, made visible, men are already
visible, blindingly so:obscuring other
presences. But if men are visible, gender usually is not. Again, a quick look
at indexes and chapter headings is telling: most commonly a proliferation of
men’s names compared to women’s; ‘women’ or ‘feminism’ sometimes present as a
category, while ‘men’ or ‘masculinity’ might as well be an endangered species.

Excuse me, comrades,
where are all the men?

‘Re-minding men’ in history means paying attention to what
it means to be a man in specific historical contexts; analysing masculinities
as they emerge from and affect events, organizations, and patterns of social
interaction.

That …feeling, that you’re somehow not there, in
the way that men are there.

If women are affected by the experience of being in a
minority, what of the often taken-for granted experience of being in a dominant
majority? This is not simply a question of numbers, but one of relationality in
the construction of identities and the distribution of power. As well as
raising such fundamental issues, this approach allows new ways of investigating
and understanding such male-dominated activities as warfare.[xviii]Recently a focus on constructions of
masculinity has begun to be evident in some anarchist histories of sexuality,
particularly male homosexuality, but much more remains to be done.[xix]

One risk in the gender approach is that it can be used to
suggest that women’s history is somehow old-fashioned or theoretically
deficient.Conversely, it can allow
historians to continue, from a new, ‘improved’ perspective, to indulge their
fascination with male subjects, so re-iterating men’s place at the centre of
historical attention. But at its best, a gendered history re-minds us of the
construction of femininities and masculinities in and through the writing of
histories. In speaking of men’s ‘place’ as well as women’s ‘place’ it can begin
to displace not just those categories, but the power relations which underpin
them.

Methodologies

I
want to begin with immediate personal things.

The seventies feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’
echoes what many anarchists, particularly woman, have been arguing since
anarchism was first thought of. So far I have looked primarily at approaches to
subject matter but I want to speak very briefly about feminist methodologies as
well. While some anarchist academics scorn biography and autobiography as
somehow irrelevant to or distracting from theoretical and/or historical
analysis, never mind revolutionary practice, feminist historians pioneered the
now commonplace approach which foregrounds the act of investigating and
producing history, placing the author firmly in the picture.[xx]
This focus on the processes of research and narrative construction, the
demystification of academic expertise, fits well with the anarchist emphases on
process, the interrelationship of means and ends, and subversion of
professional authority.

‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
house’, wrote African American feminist Audre Lorde in her critique of white
academic feminism.[xxi]As well as embarking on the exciting if
difficult process of inventing new methods of demolition and rebuilding, we
could also try dismantling the tools of history writing and seeing if they can
be re-assembled into something fitter for our purposes. Ways of doing that
include using an imaginative ju-jitsu to subvert and unbalance the restraints
of academic research; acknowledging partiality — in all senses — as something
inevitable, tricky, but potentially invigorating; seeking out and reproducing a
multiplicity of narratives for a multiplicity of audiences; interacting with
audiences to generate new practices.[xxii]

Re-making anarchist histories.

[W]ars
between men's and women's eyes and ideas will become unique and renovating.

So what might all this mean for re-making anarchist
histories? For me the most valuable kinds of histories speak in many voices;
raise more questions than answers; provide cautionary and inspirational stories
and analyses which feed the imagination, suggest new possibilities.Making space in anarchist histories for women
could be part of the process of opening up anarchism — making space not just by
moving over to fit a few more in, or adding an extension, but rethinking the
whole structure.

Who counts as
history?

All the approaches I have discussed (and others I have had
to omit) have something to offer to this process. The recovery of ‘lost’
individuals widens our understanding of the many ways of living as an
anarchist, and how that may differ according to gender. And noticing the
processes of exclusion, of forgetting, raises questions about the reproduction
of hierarchies of importance which anarchists (not just historians) need to
address.

What counts as
history?

Greater attention to so-called women’s issues would mean
that the theory and practice of domestic labour, sexuality, reproduction, and
child-rearing (just for starters) were recognized not as add-on ‘topics’ but as
centrally important for understanding social organization, power relationships,
and the potential for change.

Inclusion would mean always looking to see what women were
doing in relation to a particular movement or event, whether in presence or
absence. What counts as political work?How are activists, movements, communities, economically, physically and
emotionally sustained and by whom?[xxiii]

Where do we look?

When I first began giving talks about doing anarchist
feminist history many years ago, I emphasized the difficulties, the lack of
sources, as well as the active erasures. There are difficulties. But if we
challenge the hierarchical approach which sees writing and fighting vie for
place as Top Anarchist Activity, we can begin to investigate other sources, ask
different kinds of questions, gain new inspirations.For example, given the overlaps between
anarchism and feminism, the records and recollections of feminist movements
repay attention. The peace movement has attracted many anarchist women (and
men) anxious to connect international politics with questions and experiments
in their daily life.[xxiv]
There are many other examples where understanding a wider political milieu,
rather than searching for a pure stream of anarchism, would produce a very
different picture.[xxv]

It would be useful to have more empirical information. Have
woman been always, everywhere, a minority in anarchism? Is this (as it seems to
me) more so than in other left/revolutionary groupings? Such questions are hard
to answer in a movement which is mostly without parties or membership lists –
but subscription lists, minutes, letter pages as opposed to editorial, can
provide clues. And for more recent times, oral histories can give a voice to
women who may not have left traces in print. Looking at changes over time, and
variations between different groups and activities can go beyond counting heads
to the beginnings of an analysis of the political dynamics of gender.

The lively debates in feminist historiography also have much
to offer, not only on questions of gender, but – also of relevance to
anarchists — for thinking about processes of marginalisation and
misrepresentation.

Changing the subject

Anarchism is not gender neutral, and anarchist histories
which fail to recognise this will continue to re-produce practices of
masculinity. We need to ask, in specific contexts, whether and how the
experience of anarchism in theory and practice differ for women and for men.
Gender cannot be transcended if it is not even recognised as a significant
factor.

Asking hard questions, adding new perspectives, would
benefit anarchist history as a whole.Each book, each article or letter or interview is part of an ongoing
conversation about the relationship between the past present and future of
anarchism. The more voices there are in that conversation, the better for us
all.

Hoping
to avoid repetitive headbashing rhythms of attack and defence that distract
from the broad structural issues at stake, this paper will not criticize named
texts. An expanded version, with a fuller bibliography, will be made available
on my website www.judygreenway.org.uk following the PSA
conference and further discussion.

And
to avoid confusion: as far as I am concerned, not all anarchist women are
feminists; not all anarchist feminists are women; there has been some excellent
anarchist feminist history, some written by men; anarchist feminist history is
not the same as the history of anarchist feminism, though there is currently a
large overlap between the two; no history can be impartial, or cover
everything; all approaches have something to offer.

[xi] For example, Sophie and
Sasha Kropotkin were among those who participated in women’s suffrage
demonstrations, and some imprisoned suffragettes found inspiration in Peter
Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

[xii] Sheila Rowbotham’s ‘Hidden
From History’ was a key inspiration for many of us.

[xiii] I am not suggesting that
this is necessarily conscious on the part of historians, many of whom have the
best of intentions. Some anarchist historians, including Sharif Gemie and
Richard Cleminson, have begun to address these issues, eg in Gemie (1996)
Cleminson (1998).

[xiv][xiv] In one well-known history
of anarchism, she is the only one of eight named women to get any substantive
discussion, and of the tiny proportion of publications by women in the
bibliography, almost half are about her.

[xv] A thoughtful
historiographical analysis can be found in Jose (2005).

[xxiii] I am thinking here of
partnerships like those of Milly Witcop and Rudolf Rocker, Lillian Wolfe and
Tom Keell, where in a lifetime of shared politics, it was the men’s activities
that were seen as the ‘real work’.

[xxiv] See, for example, the
frequent discussions of anarchism, feminism, and sexuality in Peace News in the 1960s and 70s.

[xxv] Sheila Rowbotham’s
exemplary biography of Edward Carpenter demonstrates how a whole complex
political, social and cultural milieu can be brought to life.

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